AT&T Inc. proposed offering digital-only telephone service in towns in Alabama and Florida as it moves toward abandoning its aging copper-wire network and escaping the U.S. regulation that goes with it.

The regional experiments, which are subject to approval by regulators, will help them decide whether AT&T and other telephone companies will be allowed to stop offering traditional wired phone service as customers migrate to wireless and Internet-based communications.

More than 70 percent of residential customers in AT&T’s 22- state service area have abandoned traditional wired service, the company said in a filing last year asking the the Federal Communications Commission to end rules preventing them from dismantling legacy systems.

“The transition’s happening. What we’ve really got to figure out is, how do we finish it,” Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory, said today at a press briefing in Washington.

The experiments will take place in West Delray Beach, Florida, and Carbon Hill, Alabama, AT&T said in a statement.

In the test areas, AT&T initially will ask customers to switch to the new technologies. In another phase that would follow further FCC approval the company would stop offering plain old telephone service to new customers, Hultquist said. Later, the company wants to switch all customers to the newer technologies, he said.

Testing System

Among other things, the trials will test whether callers can reach emergency services and whether people with medical devices and home security alarms can be assured they’ll always have a secure connection, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said in January.

Verizon Communications Inc. last year bowed to consumer complaints after it replaced copper lines on New York’s Fire Island damaged during Hurricane Sandy with wireless service. It decided to rebuild with fiber-optic circuits instead.

Verizon, the second-largest U.S. phone company by revenue, had sought to establish that it could replace its old copper lines with wireless service in places where it’s more expensive to install fiber-optic lines.

Lightly regulated cable companies that offer combinations of voice and Internet communications have gained market share, a trend that could be blunted if phone-company competitors were freed from maintaining obsolete networks, Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting senior policy scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, said in an October 2013 study commissioned by the Internet Innovation Alliance, whose supporters include AT&T.

Dramatic Savings

The FCC said all Americans must retain access to affordable service and choices through competition. Regulators are preparing for a moment “when customers would lose a choice that that they have had for a generation” as companies stop offering plain telephone service over copper, Wheeler said in January.

“It’s a big darn deal,” Stephenson said. “The amount of cost that it removes from our legacy businesses is dramatic and it’s significant.”

Supporting the old network and its “rapidly declining subscriber base” is unsustainable, Jim Cicconi, AT&T’s senior executive vice president of external and legislative affairs, said in a Jan. 30 blog post. The number of plain telephone service lines provided by AT&T dropped to 12.4 million in 2013 from 15.7 million a year earlier, Cicconi said.

AT&T will “do our very best” to provide Internet-based services in trial areas, Bob Quinn, senior vice president for federal regulatory matters, said in a 2012 blog post proposing the trials.

“For those few we cannot reach with a broadband service, whether wireline or wireless, they will still be able to keep voice service,” Quinn said. “We are very cognizant that no one should be left behind in this transition.”

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